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Elbow Room (2014)

Elbow Room
wax and plaster casts
(2014)

This piece carries on from some of my previous work, ‘Disjointed (Cultural Cartographies)’ (2013). In my explorations of nomadism, I physically dislocated and displaced the elbows by moving them from their original, intended gallery context and placing them around various parts of the Collyer Tank site.

The movement of what are literally parts of myself, and the displacement of these parts speaks volumes for the position that myself (and the Bahamas) currently lie in. There is something in the fragments that denote ideas of ‘being given the elbow’ or ‘elbow-room’ as the title suggests, and for me there is a certain importance in both ideas. The country is being ‘given the elbow’ by foreign investors exploiting the land, and the country has very little elbow-room or freedom to manoeuvre economically with the neocolonialist restraints of the capitalist model being thrust upon them. We are neither here nor there, we are disjointed and I felt that the casts from the previous work lent themselves well to exploring nomadism in this new setting.

“[Nomadic] thinking is about tracing lines of flight and zigzagging patterns that undo dominant representations.” (Braidotti, 2011, p.2), it accounts for the “fleeting copresence of multiple time zones, in a time continuum that activates and deterritorializes stable identities” (Braidotti, 2011, p.209)

Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari, or Rosi Braidotti’s approach to nomadism’s mobility is the start of an answer to combatting neocolonialism, or can we only function within the present system and structure of dominance?